Montana and the NFL

Tilleman.

INTRODUCTION

Millions of fans tie their identities to their football teams’ successes. Intense, vicious, competitive and marinated in strong feelings of camaraderie and revelry, the game of football yields much power over American society. It’s the pride of small towns, the discussion on the front porch of universities and, by far, the country’s most popular and profitable sport.

Montanans, too, take football seriously at all levels, from Pop Warner to high school contests played under Friday night lights to the raucous weekenders at the University of Montana and Montana State. Football is so rooted here we almost take it for granted. In Montana, it’s a lifestyle for some and entertainment for others. To scores of folks, football is family time or an escape from everyday life. Deeper still, there is a special pride Montanans hold when one of their own reaches the pinnacle of the sport and earns a spot in the National Football League. Indeed, sparse populations produce big loves, and to send someone to the biggest stage from the smallest of population centers is extraordinary. The franchise is often irrelevant, for Montanans will cheer on a kid from Cut Bank or Choteau or Missoula, no matter if he is a Denver Bronco, Seattle Seahawk or Carolina Panther.

The vast state of Montana has been dubbed Big Sky Country for its mythic mountains, picturesque routes, crystal-clear lakes and glaciers. But it is also where Ryan Leaf and Brock Osweiler were groomed to become franchise quarterbacks and, by reason of the small percentage of Montanans in professional sports, ambassadors of their school, college and state. Russell McCarvel, Osweiler’s football coach at Flathead High School in Kalispell, recalled telling the seventeen-year-old that he had a particular obligation to represent not only himself but his community. McCarvel recalled telling Osweiler, What you need to do is make sure that someday, when some kid is watching you on TV at Applebee’s when he’s older, he turns to his friend and says, ‘You know what? I played with that guy, I blocked for him, and he was a great guy.’ Because people from Montana love cheering for their own.

Football is a brotherhood, and that brotherhood is stretched tighter in Montana. Montanans have succeeded in reaching the country’s numberone sport, and the state has influenced the lives and careers of at least ninety NFL players, dating to the earliest days of the league’s inception, when UM running back and tackle Christian Bentz played with the Detroit Heralds in 1920, Missoula-born Herm Sawyer played with the Rochester Jeffersons and Flathead Indian Nick Lassa joined the Oorang Indians in the NFL’s third season in 1922.

It’s going to be a small book, I’m sure, was the typical response from folks when I mentioned to them that I was researching and writing a book about Montana’s NFL connections.

But that’s not the situation.

Indeed, Montana’s connections to the NFL are extensive, including a player on the earliest Green Bay Packers team (Butte-born Jack McAuliffe), a player on the first San Francisco 49ers squad of 1964 (running back Earl Pruney Parsons, who was born in Helena), one on the first Oakland Raiders team of 1964 (guard Wayne Hawkins, born in Fort Peck) and one of the most dominant offensive linemen of the 1940s (Anaconda-born Francis Cope, who earned all-decade honors as a New York Giant).

We’ve given birth to or sharpened the skills at the college ranks of several Super Bowl participants and even an NFL Player of the Year (defensive end Doug Betters, Miami Dolphins, 1983). Our links are, perhaps not surprisingly, quirky. Frosty Peters set a record of seventeen field goals in a football game, all by dropkicks, when he was a freshman at the University of Montana in 1924, against Billings Poly. Frosty later starred for the University of Illinois and spent time in the NFL. Connections include the first pure kicker inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame (Jan Stenerud) and the receiver who caught the first touchdown pass in Seattle Seahawks history (Sam McCullum). Montana has links to some of strangest, most surprising and most memorable plays and games in the history of the league, from the Music City Miracle on January 8, 2000—Stevensville’s Joe Cummings was on the field when the Buffalo Bills lost to the Tennessee Titans—to Montana State alumni Ken Amato snapping for the Titans’ Rob Bironas’s record-setting eight field goals in a game (October 21, 2007) to inaugural New Orleans Saints’ lineman Mike Tilleman blocking for Tom Dempsey’s NFL record 63-yard field goal (November 8, 1970).

For purposes of conciseness, the book includes only players who were born in Montana, raised in Montana or attended high school or college in Montana and then went on to play in the National Football League. Players who elected to settle in Montana after retirement are not included. Many former NFL players, including Drew Bledsoe and Tom Newberry, reside at least part of the year in Montana, with the highest density in the western part of the state. Migrating to Montana seems to have precedent; one of the earliest players was Jack Colahan, a member of the 1928 New York Yankees. Colahan was born in Minnesota but was married in Dillon in 1926 and is sourced as living in Butte until at least 1935.

Many Montana athletes came close but never suited up for a regularseason NFL game. For every one who made it, there are a number of players who didn’t, such as Caleb McSurdy, a standout linebacker with the UM Grizzlies from 2008 to 2011. McSurdy signed with the Dallas Cowboys and debuted strongly in the first preseason game in 2012, but he injured his Achilles’ heel in practice the next week. He was placed on injured reserve and never returned.

The 1966 Glasgow High School graduate and UM track star Roy Robinson was drafted in the ninth round in 1970 by the Atlanta Falcons and made it to the last cut. Following his discharge by the Falcons, Robinson received a tryout with the Denver Broncos, but his lack of selfdiscipline and failure to handle the intense pressure undid him. I didn’t agree with what was going on so I walked out of camp and never had another chance again in the NFL, said Robinson, who has won more track-and-field state championships than any other high school athlete in the history of the state.

A number of the greatest collegiate players in Montana sports history could not crack the roster of an NFL club. Glendive running back Don Hass had a special blend of speed and toughness at Montana State University that helped him etch his name into the record books. Hass ran for 1,460 yards and a school-record twenty touchdowns in 1966, and he gained 1,245 more yards in 1967. His 2,954 career yards are third all-time at MSU, and his twenty-nine career touchdowns and 101.5 yards-per-carry average rank first. Hass signed as a free agent with the Dallas Cowboys, but he did not last through training camp before being cut.

There are guys like Caleb McSurdy or Don Hass, who are guys who they described as can’t miss, and then freak injuries jumped out or they were not drafted and they didn’t make the NFL and that’s a frustrating thing to see, said Mick Holien, the radio announcer of the Montana Grizzlies from 1985 to 2016. But then there are guys like Scott Gragg who went high and who you knew was going to be drafted and Guy Bingham and Rocky Klever had long careers and that pretty much made a statement of how good the college programs are in Montana. Heck, [Montana-born Grizzly] Mike Tilleman won the comeback player of the year in the NFL and now he has a successful business. It all goes back to the character thing we have in Montana.

Indeed, players from Montana who have gone on to establish themselves in the NFL lack any semblance of entitlement and take nothing for granted. Football has taught Montana kids to fight for what they want, and the sport has taken some talented, dedicated athletes further in life. Football has been good to them—and they have represented us through football.

The Montana kid is going to give you something that a kid 1,000 miles away may not, said Bill Kollar, a graduate of Montana who played several years in the NFL and is currently employed as defensive line coach for the Denver Broncos. I never saw any sense of entitlement from Montana kids. They know they represent their state, their college institution and their family, and that’s the bedrock of the success. It’s a deep relationship.

The mentality is different here than in the Dakotas, or Idaho, said Holien, and the mentality of what it takes to make it, to succeed, is different here. In the mid-1960s, if you were scouting or even living in a place like Spokane, when you looked at Montana, you figured the places in Montana just weren’t good for producing football players. Back then there was such a disparity between levels of play at Montana colleges and elsewhere, but even someone like Mike Tilleman had a great career.

The profiles contained in this book emphasize the joys and struggles, challenges and hurdles, comforts and delights of reaching the NFL and representing the state of Montana at the highest level of the sport. The unpleasant truths haven’t been dodged in the conversations, and the book examines the hotbed controversies and persistent concerns surrounding the safety of current players and the responsibility of the league to assist former ones.

Greater knowledge of head injuries and their effect on deceased stars such as Junior Seau forced a re-examination of the sport. Indeed, football is under assault because of its concussions, domestic violence, player discipline, Colin Kaepernick’s political stance and the escalating perception of some that it’s too costly to watch and too dangerous to play.

Ten years after he threw one of the most celebrated passes in Pittsburgh Steelers history, wide receiver Antwaan Randle El (2002–10) has trouble walking down stairs. He is dealing with post-football mental and physical struggles at age thirty-six. He said that if he could go back, he wouldn’t play football. He said he would have stuck with baseball. Right now, he told ESPN, I wouldn’t be surprised if football isn’t around in 20, 25 years.

Bo Jackson, who suffered from hip necrosis, which required surgery for an artificial hip, told USA Today in January 2017 that, in retrospect, he would’ve passed on football. Some stars are even walking away in the prime of their careers. In 2016, Miami Dolphins running back Arian Foster retired from the NFL at age thirty after years of injuries. This is a beautifully violent game, and the same reason I loved it is why I have to walk away, Foster told Newsweek.

Still, there is an incredible number of people who love football and see it and its better values as timeless and universal. Perhaps they are more interested in the three hours of action of the game itself than thorny issues of player safety, activism and misbehavior—all will, ultimately, be forgiven. The sport faced a crisis in 1905, when at least eighteen people died while playing. President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in, encouraging safety changes and the forward pass. There’s no reason to think the NFL won’t adapt and sustain itself in time for its 100th season in 2019.

Indeed, no matter its risks, football’s rewards are undeniably alluring. When I played, there was a 70 percent chance of a player ending up broke, physically disabled and divorced, said Stevensville native Joe Cummings, who played linebacker in the NFL from 1996 to 1999. If I asked you, would you want to take a job where you would end up broke, disabled and divorced, and it would only last until you were twenty-eight, would you want the job? Probably not. But what if I told you that that job was playing in the NFL, and getting to be on ESPN, etc.? The draw to be on that stage is still too big.

If the product endures and if the country’s most popular league expands, perhaps the time will come when the state of Montana hosts a National Football League team. Crazier things have happened in the history of league expansion. In fact, when NFL owners voted in 2016 to move the Rams back to Los Angeles, Newsweek opined that they fumbled their chance to create a small-market behemoth akin to the one in Green Bay. The magazine’s alternative market selection: Billings, the largest city in Montana.

If NFL commissioner Roger Goodell were searching a map for the epicenter of the Lower 48 that has yet to be colonized by an NFL franchise, he would place a thumbtack in Billings. The closest NFL franchise is Denver, which is 554 miles—or about the distance between Jacksonville and New Orleans—south. The nearest NFL franchise to the west, the Seattle Seahawks, is 817 miles away, while the nearest to the east, the Minnesota Vikings, is 840 miles away.

It reasoned that the town of Green Bay, Wisconsin, home to the most devoted fans in the NFL and approximately 105,000 people, attracts its spectators from the city of Milwaukee and all through Wisconsin. Billings, with a similarly sized population of about 109,000, could theoretically lure supporters from throughout the Treasure State as well as its four boundary states (Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming), none of which is home to an NFL franchise.

Sweet dreaming? Perhaps. But until that time arrives, Montana football fans will continue to derive gratification from the sight of seeing one of its home-grown high school kids or college stars run, throw and tackle in an NFL uniform. Any NFL uniform will be adequate.

1

1920S–1950S

FRANK SCOTT AKINS

BORN: March 31, 1919, Dutton, MT

DIED: July 6, 1992, Redding, CA

COLLEGE: Washington State

POSITION: Running back

NFL EXPERIENCE: 1943–46

TEAM: Washington Redskins

Dutton-born Frank Akins played as a running back for the Washington Redskins in the 1940s. He attended high school at John R. Rogers in Spokane and played college football at Washington State University.

Selected in the thirtieth round of the 1943 NFL draft, Akins, five feet, ten inches and 210 pounds, played four seasons with the Redskins, gaining 1,142 yards on 244 carries.

In 1943 and 1944, Akins saw action as a punter and as a special teams star, leading the league with four blocked punts in 1944. In 1945, he carried the ball 147 times, the most in the league that season, finishing with 797 yards, second only to the Philadelphia Eagles’ Steve Van Buren’s 832 yards. Akins had a total of 854 yards from scrimmage. In his best season, 1945, Akins averaged 5.4 yards per carry and scored six touchdowns. That year, Akins finished with 79.7 rushing yards per game, second to Van Buren’s 83.2, and he was voted first team All-NFL by Pro Football Illustrated and International News Service. He touched the ball 156 times, second only to Van Buren’s total of 180.

A newspaper account from October 24, 1945, refers to benchwarmer Frank Scott Akins, the Spokane sporting goods salesman, who has been spending the better part of the last two seasons sitting on the Washington Redskins’ bench, leads the National League today in ground gaining. The following day’s Billings Gazette noted that the former substitute back had sparked the Redskins to become the leading offensive team in football and acerbically added that Akins had once trekked back to Spokane to sell sporting goods and tell customers about games he didn’t play in.

In the 1945 National Football League championship game, Akins, quarterback Sammy Baugh and the 8-2 Redskins faced quarterback Bob Waterfield and the 9-1 Cleveland Rams. Held on December 16, 1945, at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in front of 32,178 fans, the match boasted two opposing quarterbacks who could have dueled for the honorific title of professional football’s dandiest personality.

Waterfield, the twenty-five-year-old Rams rookie, attracted the public’s attention because of his marriage to actress and leading sex symbol Jane Russell, whom he had known from Van Nuys High School. Nicknamed Slinging Sammy for his ability to chuck a baseball, the thirty-one-year-old Baugh spent the 1945 season commuting back and forth from his west Texas cattle ranch in Rotan to play for the Redskins on weekends. Baugh was an outstanding quarterback, safety and punter during a sixteen-year career with the Redskins that ended after the 1952 season.

One hour before kickoff, a biting wind swirled off of Lake Erie, plunging the thermometer into negative temperatures. The mercury climbed a few degrees above zero by kickoff, but it never reached more than six degrees that afternoon. According to International News Service, the league had a plan to weatherize the stadium and field and took precautions to stay girded for the climactic battle. Nine hundred tons of straw that cost $7200 spread over the stadium surface lent the helpful promise that the expected throng of 55,000 might see a football game instead of an impromptu version of the Ice Follies.

In the first quarter, Akins suffered a broken nose after being hit by Rams guard Riley Matheson. He refused to leave the game and was contained to 16 yards on six attempts. Anaconda-born Milan Lazetich was one of the Rams’ starting offensive guards.

On the strength of two touchdown passes from Waterfield, the Rams earned a 15–14 victory. Police dispatched special details to the Union Terminal and Hotel in Cleveland to aid and thaw out frozen fans huddled inside buildings outside the stadium.

John Dietrich wrote in the Plain Dealer: It was a triumph not only for the Rams…but also for professional football. When more than 32,000 fans…will struggle through zero weather to see a football game, there is no longer any question. The pros have arrived to stay. Each Ram took home $1,408.74, $20.00 more per man than the winning Giants pocketed in 1944. The Redskins made $902.00 each.

In 1946, Akins picked up 146 yards on the ground. He ended up in Shasta County, California, coaching Anderson High School football in the 1960s. He died in 1992 in Redding, California.

EDWARD ROSS BARKER

BORN: May 31, 1931, Dillon, MT

DIED: September 6, 2012, Lakewood, WA

COLLEGE: Washington State University

POSITION: End

NFL EXPERIENCE: 1953–54

TEAMS: Pittsburgh Steelers (1953); Washington Redskins (1954)

Edward Ross Barker, the son of Edward R. Barker Sr. and Julia Barker, attended grade school in Aberdeen, Washington, and his high school years were spent in Sunnyside, Washington. Barker was a natural athlete excelling in football and track; in 1949, he was the state champion in the high jump.

Barker attended Washington State University (WSU), where he was a walk-on athlete and became the premier pass receiver on the Pacific coast. He set several receiving records at WSU, within the Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) and in the nation. In 1951, Cougar quarterback Bob Burkhart established a new PCC record with fifteen touchdown passes, while end Barker set an NCAA receiving record with 847 yards.

Barker played in the 1952 East-West Shriner Game at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. In 1953, he was a first-round draft pick for the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams. He went on to play one year at left end with the Pittsburgh Steelers and one year with the Washington Redskins. He played six games with the Steelers in 1953, hauling in seventeen passes for 172 yards and one touchdown, and he saw action in twelve contests with the Redskins in 1954, totaling 353 yards on twenty-three catches and three touchdowns. After football, he began a twenty-year career with the U.S. Air Force.

According to his obituary, he was stationed in Washington, Guam, Puerto Rico, Louisiana, Korea, California, Florida and Okinawa and was proud of his military service. After Barker retired from the military, he began another career as a real estate agent in Lakewood, Washington, and enjoyed traversing the woods of eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana for that perfect buck and bull elk.

In 2011, Barker was inducted into the Washington State University Football Hall of Fame. He died in 2012.

CHRISTIAN BENTZ

BORN: December 20, 1891, Artis, SD

DIED: January 10, 1981, Spokane, WA

COLLEGES: Northern State University; Montana

POSITIONS: Offensive tackle; running back; kicker

NFL EXPERIENCE: 1920

TEAM: Detroit Heralds

Christian Bentz was captain of the 1917 University of Montana Grizzlies team and was Montana’s first All-American. He lettered at tackle from 1914 to 1917 and was selected to Walter Camp’s All-Service team in 1918. When the Bobcats looked like winners and the Grizzlies didn’t seem to have a chance back in 1918, it was Bentz who galloped down the field with four minutes to go and presented Montana with the winning touchdown. He raced 15 yards to a touchdown with four Bobcats hanging on to him for dear life, according to one newspaper account.

He was 235 pounds, and that was huge for the time, said Mick Holien, radio announcer for the Montana Grizzlies from 1985 to 2016. He kicked, anchored both offensive and defensive line, and he carried the ball on goal line situations. He also coached in 1917 after Montana coach Jerry Nissen got sick. They called him ‘Blitzen.’ He was named All-Northwest three times in four years, but I don’t have anything [records or data on his life] after he left UM.

Every generation of Grizzly football dating back to the 1920s has produced a handful of NFL players—some of them Pro Bowlers and many of them journeymen. Bentz is the first Grizzly and person connected to Montana, either by birth or college, to play in the NFL. According to NFL archives, Bentz is credited with appearing in one game and being active for two on the roster of the Detroit Heralds in 1920, though details are nebulous. (An article from the Fort Wayne Sentinel of November 11, 1920, with a team roster and brief background data for each player, identifies Benz as tackle, All-American service team in 1918.)

Bentz is one of those off-the-wall guys who is hard to find info about, said football historian Steven Jubyna. He was considered to be a great lineman. He then spent time in the military. He’s listed as playing one game [for the 1920 Heralds], but I haven’t been able to find any reference to him playing for Detroit, outside of the sites that copy the football websites. He seems to have no connection to the city of Detroit, and he was already twenty-nine. Considering that Bentz seemed to have no connection to the Detroit area, what circumstance enabled him to play one game there?

In the summer of 1936, Bentz, now a Lemmon, SD banker, made his first visit to the campus since he graduated in 1918. According to the June 4, 1936 Helena Independent Record, Bentz spent time getting reacquainted with track coach Harry Adams and other alumni. He’s still big brawny and husky voiced. His hair is gray. But he’s yet one of the heroes of the year when Montana tied Syracuse university pretenders for the national championship.

Bentz died in Spokane in 1981.

JOHN D. BERTOGLIO

BORN: May 14, 1899, Butte, MT

DIED: July 22, 1973, Homosassa Springs, FL

NFL EXPERIENCE: 1926

TEAM: Columbus Tigers

John Bertoglio was a standout athlete at Butte High in the 1920s, leading the Bulldogs to the state football title in 1924 with eighteen touchdowns. He finished his career with thirty-nine touchdowns, the most ever by a Bulldog. He tallied twenty touchdowns during the 1923 season, which still stands as a record at Butte High. He also scored a school record six touchdowns in one game, against Deer Lodge. Bertoglio also won the long jump at the 1923 and 1924 state track meets. The Bulldogs won the 1924 competition.

According to NFL records, Bertoglio played seven games for the Columbus Tigers in 1926. Individual rushing statistics at that time were unformulated, although he is credited with one rushing touchdown against the Brooklyn Lions on October 23, 1926. He died in Florida at the age of seventy-four.

MAL BROSS

BORN: December 7, 1903, Great Falls, MT

DIED: February 8, 1989

COLLEGE: Gonzaga

POSITION: Running back

NFL EXPERIENCE: 1927

TEAMS: Los Angeles Wildcats (1926) (AFL); Green Bay Packers (1927)

Born in Great Falls in 1903, Matthew Bross, a product of the Great Falls sand lot and high school gridirons, was a star halfback at Gonzaga University and a running back for the Green Bay Packers in 1927.

Nicknamed Mal, Bross starred on the Lethbridge Elks’ baseball team of 1924 as a third baseman. He was an honor student and, as a junior, accorded signal honors for high standing in several branches of education. He graduated from Gonzaga in June 1926.

Bross then signed with the Los Angeles Wildcats, a traveling team based in Chicago, part of the newly minted and short-lived American Football League. Formed and folded within several months, the league was started by a sports agent named C.C. Pyle whose application to join the National Football League was rejected.

According to one newspaper account, Bross most likely